Month: May 2018

Australian film heresy: I’ve never seen Peter Weir’s 1975 adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock. I’ve read the novel, by Joan Lindsay, several times, but mostly because I like boarding school fiction. The movie has always been on my “one day I’ll watch that” list.

But I was intrigued enough by Foxtel’s new six-episode adaptation that, to my flatmate’s dismay, I signed up for a Foxtel Play trial to stream it.

(Sidebar: Foxtel Play’s streaming quality is quite good, but every time I opened the app on our TV, The Bolt Report would come blaring out. No one needs Andrew Bolt and Peta Credlin in their living room. In future, I think I’ll just get my Foxtel-made series on DVD from the library.)

Unfortunately, the new adaptation is a bit terrible. The good news is, it’s terrible in some interesting ways.

Despite the title stolen from Conan Doyle, there are no brilliant detectives or glamorous, worldly courtesans in this account of the 1930 murder of a young Melbourne woman. The murder remains unsolved; A Scandal in Bohemia is more interested in the life of the victim, Mollie Dean, and her afterlife as an Australian literary muse.